The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist

by Darren Humphries

  Taking a deep breath and fighting against everything that all my senses were telling me, I stumbled on towards the staircase that I was now going to have to descend. As I moved forward, the floor twisted into a spiral in front of me and the light strobed through all the colours of the rainbow and a few others that human eyes had a hard time dealing with. Fortunately, the glass in the faceplate cut out a lot of those. The distance between the bottom (top, whatever) of the staircase eased away from me as if some dimensional giant was stretching out reality like a piece of soft toffee. At the same time gravity started to increase, making each step harder than the last and I was dragged closer and closer to the floor until I was firstly on my hands and knees and then wriggling forwards on my stomach like a worm.

  Just as I reached the point where I could go no further, the room righted itself, snapped back to its normal shape and orientation, and was white once more. The machines were humming and thrumming to themselves and I could breathe again normally. Standing above me was a figure swathed in protective equipment and looking rather like an artist’s impression of an ambulatory pear. It pulled off its head covering to reveal a pinched face slicked with sweat.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” the engineering technician demanded in a tone that was a mixture of outraged anger at the intrusion and fear at how close someone had come to being squished to the consistency of apple compote on his watch. That wouldn’t have looked good on his CV at all. “Can’t you read?”

  “Not if the writing’s joined up,” I gasped harshly, finally managing to sit up. “Don’t you know we’re under lockdown?”

  “Lockdown?” the man repeated, as though the word had no relevance to him. Certainly he looked unconcerned. “No. We never get told anything down here, except when someone wants a few extra gigawatts to run some unified field experiments.”

  “OK,” I said quickly to forestall him. Now was not the time to get caught up in an industrial relations negotiation. “Get yourself to your evacuation preparation point and then get yourself evacuated. Am I going to be safe going up there?” I pointed to what was now back to being the top of the staircase.

  “Oh yes,” he replied in the distracted fashion of a specialist being asked to think outside of his chosen field. “You’re in the eye of the distortion. This point is very stable.”

  “Good,” I scrambled up the staircase, not caring if he followed the instructions I’d given him or not.

  I was a lot more careful exiting from the Generator Room than I had been entering it. I was back on the same level as Miranda and a whole lot less well-armed than she was. The biggest laboratory on this level was the same size as the loading dock at ground level and towered up to just below the lobby floor two basement levels above. It took me only a few moments to get to one of the entrance doors from where I was, but Miranda was already there.

  The obelisk had been erected in the very centre of the room. It had been placed onto a large raised plate, which allowed detectors to be placed under it as well as all the way around it whilst experiments were carried out to determine what it had actually been intended for and whether it presented any sort of threat, either by itself or in concert with the other buildings or structures around it in its normal setting. It towered above the testing equipment that was positioned all around it. Standing in front of its imposing bulk, Miranda’s slim frame was dwarfed by its sheer presence. Some of the hieroglyphic carvings on its surface were as tall as she was. She was facing it with her arms outstretched as though in supplication or reverence. In either case, she didn’t notice as I slipped in through one of the small entrance doors. Her face was rapt in the moment, with success so close at hand, exultant with the destruction she was about to unleash.

  I looked around desperately for a weapon and spotted something that I recognised amongst the mass of high tech scanning equipment. It wasn’t my first choice considering the circumstances, but it was better than the pointed stick that I didn’t possess. I flicked switches and was pleased to note that nobody had misaligned anything on this model and the generator came to life almost silently.

  Miranda reached into the handbag that was, against all likelihood, still strapped over one shoulder (now accompanied by two Uzis) and took out a small perfume bottle. She sprayed just a touch on her neck and then threw the bottle at the obelisk. It struck the stone and shattered, the liquid staining the surface. There were enough detectors on the entrances to the building to ensure that no explosive compound was going to get past the doors, but there were an endless number of combinations of inert liquids that, when put together, could become explosive. Her brother Arnie, the chemist, had come up with a compound that turned rock into explosives when he was working for the Welsh quarrying company and this group who didn’t call themselves the Children of Osiris had forced him to render that down into inert, undetectable components. A jar of face cream came out of the handbag and she hurled it at the obelisk. She was a good shot and it would have hit at the exact same spot as the perfume bottle had it not been struck in mid flight by a bolt of pure electricity and instantly atomised.

  Miranda screamed in crazed shock and frustration, wheeling around to face me, hands diving for the assorted weaponry slung around her body.

  “I wouldn’t,” I warned her, brandishing the electric probe that was a larger and more focussed version of the demon repeller that I was so fond of in the field. “It’s over and you lost.”

  “There’s more than one way of starting the reaction,” she said and her hand seized one of the Uzis.

  Lightning leapt from the machine in my hands and passed by her so closely that it left her clothing smoking on one side.

  “You missed,” she said with a wide and satisfied smile. She was so secure in the knowledge that she was on the side of truth and justice that she believed that the universe itself was clearly looking after her, “and so you lose.”

  “Did I miss?”

  She looked behind her, following the direction of my glance. The electric discharge had not been aimed at her. I had fired directly at the supporting structure beneath the plate holding up the obelisk. Parts of the framework were melted and buckled and what was left was no match for the immense weight bearing down on it. Columns compressed and cross-beams twisted. The plate canted forwards and the obelisk toppled. It hit the wall of the laboratory high above us and cracked, shearing under the impact. As higher sections shattered off and plummeted to the ground, the bottom section remained stubbornly whole and bore down on her with the kind of grinding, pulverising sound that might accompany an avalanche if it was in a really bad mood. When it was over, the obelisk lay in dozens of pieces and thick dust was settling slowly onto every surface. The cleaners were not going to like me in the morning, not to mention what Mrs Freidriksen or the Egyptian government were going to have to say on the matter.

  On the far side of the room, an exit door swung shut.

  “Oh bugger.”

  I scrambled over to a point where the monument had cracked widely enough to leave a space between broken sections and squeezed through. Miranda couldn’t have leaped out of the way, ex-gymnast or not. She had been as transfixed by the majestic toppling of the obelisk as I had been and there hadn’t been time enough for her to get out of the way. Somewhere on her she must have had a teleporter. If it was small enough to conceal then it could only have been a single shot and short range device. Just far enough to shift her out of the crush zone of the falling obelisk.

  I burst through the door and once again my sheer speed saved me as the whole area erupted in shredded wood and plaster in a deadly display that could only be caused by an Uzi on full automatic. I bounced off the far wall, waiting for a second volley to slam into my bulletproof spell (which was only rated for a single impacts rather than raking machine gun fire. Only the military could afford those and you had to be built like a WWA wrestler to even walk whilst wearing one), but she was already running, leaving the empty gun lying in the middle of the corridor floor.
I took off after her as fast as I could, but she hadn’t plummeted down the side of the building in the last half hour or forced her way through spatial and gravitational distortions and it was a chase that I was never going to win. She was going to reach the cargo lift up to the loading bay before I could catch her. She also still had a gun. From the loading bay she would be able to take one of the fork lift trucks, or even any of the articulated lorries or vans that had been caught on site by the lockdown and crash her way out through the roller doors.

  I rounded the final corner of the corridor and slid to a halt. She was stood with her back to the closed lift doors her remaining machine gun held steady, aimed at my midriff. The light above her head was descending through the few numbers that separated her from freedom.

  “I’ve sealed off the corridor. There’s no way back to the obelisk,” I told her, lying freely. It’s one of the things that I’m really good at. “Your best chance now is to surrender and co-operate fully with the investigation.”

  “You forget who is holding the most popular machine gun in the world and who is not,” she pointed out, waving the muzzle of the weapon slightly for completely unnecessary emphasis.

  “No I’m not,” I assured her with absolute sincerity. There were very few thoughts larger or more prominent in my mind at that moment than who was holding the gun. The direction in which the gun was pointing and the pressure that her finger was bringing to bear on the trigger were the only two that came to mind. I was very careful not to advance.

  “You know that it never would have worked, don’t you?” I asked in what I hoped was a disarmingly (literally in this case) conversational tone. “Even had you destroyed them, the Circle would have just been replaced by another one. Well, perhaps not another circle, maybe a dodecahedron or a conical section,” I was rambling, but not without purpose, “but some sort of geometrical grouping of high-powered magic users. It’s what the people have become used to. It’s what they want.”

  “Well it shouldn’t be,” she complained.

  “Tell me why,” I encouraged her. I considered trying a casual step forward, but then I also considered my guts being sprayed all over the wall behind me and stayed where I was. “Tell me why The Magic Circle needs to be destroyed.”

  It was an invitation that no self-respecting zealot could ever hope to refuse. The descending lift was only seconds away, but that was time enough for her to make her point, to get her message through even if she hadn’t managed to underline it with a smoking hole in the ground where the Agency HQ used to be.

  “Because The Circle is holding us back,” she said, more a cry for understanding than a fact.

  “This nameless group of yours?”

  “No! Humanity.” she declared with an upward jerk of the gun barrel that almost had me diving for cover, but I managed to hold my ground. Barely. “This reliance on magic has stunted our growth as a race, as a species. We are destined for greatness, for great things and yet we are kept huddled beneath the safe umbrella of the Magic Circle’s ‘protection’,” the way that she said it made it obvious that this was not the real word she was looking for, “Never moving forwards. Never striving.”

  “The Circle gave us peace,” I reminded her gently. It’s a tricky thing arguing with someone who is holding a piece of deadly weaponry. If they actually lose the argument they are likely to decide to change the outcome through a hail of bullets. Which was kind of my point about World Peace if you think about it.

  She didn’t.

  “Which has held us back more than any other single thing,” she railed. “Without strife there is no drive to improve, to invent, to innovate. Conflict drives us forward, to be more than the other side, to achieve bigger and better things.”

  Bigger and better bombs maybe.

  “We ought to have achieved great things by now. We ought to have at least landed on the moon by now.”

  I chose not to mention the photographs I had seen that had been taken a few years back by the Mount Palomar Observatory of what had appeared to be a bunch of Cambridge undergraduates in evening dress celebrating May Day by holding a tea party in a lunar crater. The photographs had been clear enough to show that there wasn’t a lot of actual tea being served. That event had been hushed up by the Agency at the price of a new optical telescope. I am told that the new telescope could have told us what brand of champagne it was that they were all drinking. Some of those undergraduates were now working for Mrs Freidriksen’s department. Harnessing talent was what the Agency did, no matter how that talent had been used previously.

  “Science is the way forward, not magic.”

  I tried one last time, “Magic is science. The two disciplines are not mutually exclusive, they are two facets of the same diamond.” Oh great, now I was reduced to jewellery metaphors. “They both look at the same world, at the same physical laws and whilst science explains them and harnesses them, magic channels them in other ways. Same coin, different sides.”

  There was a soft chime and the doors of the lift rumbled open behind her. Since it was the cargo lift, it took a couple of seconds.

  “You’ll never understand,” she told me as she stepped back into the lift and she was right about that. “How could you? You do know that this isn’t over.”

  “Cells,” I answered her and she frowned, understandably uncomprehending.

  “What?” she asked, but the word hadn’t been meant for her.

  The intended recipient of the one word message, the lift’s speech recognition system, did understand, “Confirmation required.”

  “Hydra’s Teeth.”

  The doors rumbled shut and there was just time for her to shout desperately, “What have you done?” before they came together with an audible thump. The light above the door started count down through the levels. There was only one. Some short time after it passed that, her faint screams of frustration became not-so-faint screams of terror. There was a brief burst of gunfire. The terror became pain and those screams went on for quite some time.

  Director Freidriksen’s Office

  The ocean of marbled floor was, if anything, even more polished as I stepped out of the lift into the penthouse office at Agency HQ. From behind a newly-installed desk just to the right of the doors, Penny Kilkenny greeted me with a smile that could have powered Chicago for a week. She had certainly gone up in the world and her skin seemed to glow in the presence of the sun, something I don’t think I’d ever seen since we’d always met below ground. The sunlight in question was slanting in through the giant plate glass windows. Mrs Freidriksen didn’t need a layer of boiling clouds behind her to appear imposing and the shutting down of the weather control system on the roof had been one of her first commandments after being given the job so recently vacated by the late Director Grayson.

  “The Director will see you now,” Penny advised, though the summons that had come down to my office had been rather unequivocal on exactly when the Director would see me. Since this was my first meeting with Mrs Freidriksen in her new post as the Director of Operations, I was on time…well, five minutes late just for the look of the thing.

  Five minutes late is on time for me.

  Mrs Freidriksen suited the Director’s desk in a way that Grayson never had. She commanded an air of authority, much as he had, but also a sense that this was where she belonged whereas he had always exuded the idea that he had somehow fallen into the job because he hadn’t been paying enough attention at the planning meeting to object at the right time. Her sitting in the Big Chair seemed to suggest that everything was right with the order of the world. Things were as they should be. She sat ramrod straight in the new seat, ignoring the pair of workmen who were busy reconstructing the pillar escape chute that had been so useful so recently. Her hands flew over a keyboard built into the top of the entirely new desk, but she stopped typing as I approached and peered at me over the top of her glasses as though I was some sort of interesting bacterium that had just swum into view under the lens of her microscop
e. Her features remained still and cold, as though carved out of the face of a glacier. Many people had felt as though that same glacier had run right over them following meetings with the new Director.

  When I reached the desk, she gestured at the chair opposite with the clear intimation that I should sit in it. Either that or she wanted me to take it away. Since there were workmen present who were better skilled in the relocation of office furniture, I chose to infer the former and sat. There was no sign in the room of its former occupant, but then that’s one of the good things about marble – it cleans up well.

  “I suppose that you are expecting some sort of commendation,” she said at length, “following recent events?”

  “Let’s see,” I made a great show of thinking about this and listing the various factors that I was considering on each finger, “I uncovered a plot of global proportions, stopped the bombing of this entire building, saved the lives of everyone inside it and also saved the Magic Circle, and by extension the whole of civilisation as we know it, from destruction so yes I do feel some small measure of gratitude would be entirely appropriate.”

  “Thank you,” she said, with no obvious trace hint of irony or humour. “Now let’s turn to the matter of the report that you filed as part of the main incident file.” There was no file on her desk and she made no attempt to access it on her computer. “There are a lot of interesting measurements included.”